In 1095, Pope Urban II cried “Deus Vult” – “God wills it” – at the Council of Clermont and unleashed the first Crusade. Almost a millennium later, that same Latin legend appears tattooed on the arm of the United States Secretary of Defense. It is not an anecdote: it is the aesthetic clue of a political strategy that, as the conflict with Iran and the hostilities in the Persian Gulf continue, clearly reveals its two engines. For Trump, military and diplomatic actions in the region pursue both foreign policy and – perhaps above all – domestic policy objectives.
The MAGA coalition today shows tectonic fractures. The Epstein case and the return of the United States and American troops to conflicts abroad – the promise not to do so was a central banner of Trump’s electoral campaign in 2024 – have opened visible cracks; An openly anti-war faction is already emerging within it, and the president’s approval ratings are falling in practically all the demographics that led him to victory. Faced with erosion, Trump is seeking to consolidate his hardline vote, among which a significant portion embraces Christian nationalism. And there the narrative, messages and religious iconography that he and his close circle have resorted to make sense: they are calibrated to seduce that base and the evangelical leaders who control a sophisticated electoral mobilization apparatus, the most disciplined bloc of the Republican Party. It is not surprising, then, that some of his most prominent supporters are openly framing the conflict with Iran in a religious light.
Many of Trump’s followers see him as a sacralized figure. At a recent Easter event held at the presidential house, Paula White-Cain – senior advisor to the White House Office of Faith and a long-time advisor to the president – compared him, unequivocally, to Jesus: “You were betrayed, arrested and falsely accused,” she told him, “a familiar pattern that our Lord and Savior showed us.” Leaders of the religious right have for years maintained that Trump was “chosen by God”; He has always played along: he surrounds himself with hypocrites and sycophants, pulverizes the principle of the secular State – the cornerstone of American democracy with the constitutional First Amendment – and spreads religious prophecies on his social networks. In March, a video circulated of pastors placing their hands and praying for the president inside the Oval Office itself. Another extremist religious sector, direct heir of the New Apostolic Reformation and the so-called “Mandate of the Seven Mountains”, is convinced that the West is waging a clash of civilizations against Islam. Religious rhetoric serves to present the war in Gaza, the Middle East, Iran and the Persian Gulf, as another chapter in that crusade. Among the most fervent Trumpists, the professed faith, properly interpreted, is simply a theology of dominion: crushing the enemy, iron will, and celebration of hypermasculine violence.
Pete Hegseth, Trump’s Secretary of Defense, is one of the men who most explicitly plucks those strings. Over the past year, its renamed “War Department” – the name of the department that Washington had abandoned with the National Security Act of 1947 and whose return is, in itself, a symbolic statement – has produced promotional videos with Bible verses and prayers superimposed on images of tanks, soldiers, fighter jets and missiles. The former Fox News journalist has stressed his intention to restore a warrior culture in the Pentagon and in the US armed forces. Hegseth also sports tattoos that unequivocally refer to the Crusades, including the aforementioned “Deus Vult” on the inner forearm and the Jerusalem Cross, also called the Cross of the Crusaders, on the chest. That iconography is increasingly popular among American white supremacists, including several of the Capitol stormers on January 6, 2021; It had already appeared, moreover, at the neo-Nazi march in Charlottesville in 2017 during Trump’s first term, which he rhetorically minimized and normalized. On his left bicep, Hegseth also displays the Arabic word “kafir” – “infidel” or “unbeliever” – apparently to provoke Muslims and define himself in opposition to them.
The same ideology beats in his 2020 book, American crusade: Our fight to stay free. In it he presents the medieval crusades as a defensive war and maintains that Muslims and Christians are fighting a civilizational battle. He claims that Europe is “demographically and culturally surpassed” by Muslims and blames “pusillanimous and weak European politicians.” Not coincidentally, this speech contributes to the story that Trump, his vice president and a good part of the White House deploy against Europe, which explains the onslaught of the last year against European leaders and mayors and against the European Union itself, and which sheds light on the fascination of the presidential environment with figures like Viktor Orbán, the recently defeated Hungarian prime minister. In the same book, Hegseth concludes: “Could the same thing happen in the United States? Of course. Like the Christian crusaders who repelled the Muslim hordes in the 12th century, American crusaders must muster the same courage against the Islamists of today.” His reading of the aggression against Iran as a holy war explains his media prominence throughout the conflict.
This scaffolding is not improvised. Behind Trump and Hegseth there operates an ecosystem woven with patience: the Heritage Foundation’s Project 2025 – an analysis center that for decades was anchored in the conservative right of the Republican Party and that, starting with Trump’s first term, decided to pivot to the extreme right and become the think tank leader for the public policies of the MAGA movement – which advocates the capture of the federal bureaucracy under theocratic and theopolitical premises; Russell Vought, architect of “Schedule F” and theorist of Christian nationalism from the White House Budget Office; House Speaker Mike Johnson, an outspoken advocate of applying a strict “biblical worldview” to government; and a circuit of others think tanks and podcasts that recruit young men for a crusade that mixes gym, whiskey and psaltery. What previously fit on the evangelical periphery is today part of the architecture of power.
All this grammar and symbolism has tangible consequences beyond the Persian Gulf, and weighs particularly heavily on our region. It turns immigration policy into a moral hunt and rewrites the link with Mexico and Latin America from civilizational suspicion. The rhetoric of “demographic replacement,” recycled from supremacist forums to the Oval Office, frames Mexicans and Central Americans as an existential threat and justifies xenophobia and mass deportations. Understanding the religious engine of Trumpism is, therefore, not an anecdotal exercise: it is a condition for deciphering why what we see, in terms of narrative, public policies and foreign policy, seems crusading.
The extreme religious right and Christian nationalism will continue to be decisive pieces in Trump’s political future, and Hegseth – his “Secretary of War” – will be one of his most influential symbols and spokesperson. The risk, however, transcends Trump and Hegseth. When a nuclear superpower conducts its foreign policy with the grammar of the end of times – crusades, infidels, civilizations destined to collide – the margin for diplomacy narrows and the door to escalation remains ajar. The question is not whether God wants it, but who will pay the bill when faith and an increasingly theocratic regime replace reason of state.
*This article was originally published in Free Letters.
